p.s. I Luv you

p.s. I Luv you

Everything I ever needed to learn about computers, I learned from my baby sister, the genius. All right, she was just a year younger than me, but she was smarter than an IBM 360. I'm telling this story as a way to remember her.

At the age of 10, Sis memorized Dad's password at UCH (University of California, Hamilton) and perpetrated the great "p.s. I Luv you" hack of 1977. We were supposed to be playing chess on the secretaries desk near Dad's office at 8 oclock at night. We were bored.

Sis managed to get the e-mail system to add "p.s. I Luv you" to the end of some e-mail messages. Whoever you sent e-mail to first, be it your boss, a student in your class, or a correspondent in another state, would receive the extra line, on every e-mail message you ever sent. No one else you sent e-mail to would get the extra line, even if you were sending the same message to several people.

One shy young couple who always e-mailed each other first thing in the morning canceled their date for the next weekend: they eloped instead.

The next day, she added a variation. That phrase was removed from all other mail in the university. So if you returned the mail message to the sender, to ask them why on earth they sent you this p.s., the offending phrase would be deleted from the message. This resulted in some angry confrontations, along the lines of

"Did too!"

"Did not!"

"Why you dirty little <beep> <beep> <beep>. Are you calling me a liar?"

Some people received the extra line from several people. One secretary in accounting kept receiving this message from fully 34 faculty members and 3 department heads! She was the first to resign from the University over this little joke. She found a higher paying job in the governor's office.

Sis was thrilled when she heard about it from a classmate whose mother was also a secretary in accounting. Her smirk caught the attention of her best friends. She diverted their attention by becoming the central source for all the "ps" gossip. She did it by reading everyone's e-mail, or at least, all of the mail about "ps I luv you". She got the program that removed the "ps" line to find all of the messages for her.

Then she added another twist to the return mail. Instead of removing the offending phrase, the new version of the program replaced it with "p.s. Why were you so late last time?"

Now people started to get curious. "I said WHAT? Let me look at that!" Victims actually got together to look at what was on their former friends' screens. People sharing an office overheard what the next person was talking about. Soon everyone knew that everyone had a problem.

Sis immediately removed that version and went back to the unmodified mail program. It was too dangerous. People might figure out who had done it.

For over two weeks, people could send their e-mail in peace.

Then she struck again. This time, she let me help. Of course, if she hadn't, I said I would tell Dad, but that was an empty threat. Dad would blame me for it. He couldn't believe that Sis was smarter than me, even if she had the report cards to prove it.

This time started out as a near disaster. Sis was getting too ambitious, and I was helping too much. We only had the change about half done when Dad yelled at us from his office. He was really annoyed at us for arguing so loud.

Sis had planned for this. She killed the screen in about 2 keystrokes and knocked over the chess men on the board we had set up. When Dad stomped in we were picking them up.

"You're so loud I can't hear myself think! What am I going to do with you? You know you shouldn't pick on your sister like that!"

I was so nervous I would have just stood there and taken it, but Sis yelled, "It is not either my fault, you big bully." which is usually the response to what I say when we get in trouble. Dad looked startled for a second but when I yelled back at her, he got just as mad as usual and we got away with it.

Sis wasn't sure what was going to happen with the mail. She needn't have worried. It was a beauty!

She had intended to have all the men send heart pictures, drawn in letters, to all the women they sent messages to on St. Valentines day. She had set up some rules for defining who were likely to be men and who were likely to be women. I had been typing the code for the rules and got it backwards. All professors received the hearts from each other and all the secretaries received the hearts from each other.

What a response! The women started out saying "Oh! How nice!" "Now isn't that just sweet of her!" About 8:15am old quarrels were disappearing, and old and new friendships were blossoming.

Then they realized that these hearts were coming from everywhere, and that none of their supposed friends had actually sent them! By 8:30, there was a chill in the air like a Winnipeg winter wind.

That's when the professors started to get the hearty mail from each other. One or two remembered the p.s. thing and phoned to check. Several of them turned beet red and logged out immediately. One man put on some lipstick he always had handy and went around to give his new friend a kiss: and nearly got shot for it.

The one woman professor in chemistry printed out five or six of them and called on the department head to stop these bigots from harassing her.

The secretaries, and some of the professors, met in righteous anger and shared their stories of indignity. Soon departments held meetings and eventually, after a day or two, a delegation went to the system administration department and asked Dad to make sure it didn't happen again.

We had been playing chess again, so it was all cleaned up. Dad couldn't find anything. But he promised to "do something".

When Sis logged in as Dad again, it didn't work. The password had been changed. She tried a few other names to see if he was using them as passwords: his middle name, our middle names, Mom's maiden name, and the name of the dog he had as a boy.

Bingo! Yup, his new password was good old Bingo! Sis typed happily away, checking on log files, then stopped and said, "Oops!" and looked startled. Dad had activated a log file showing all the login attempts that failed and what password had been tried. Sis deleted our attempts from the log file and put a heart in it. Then she logged off and we played chess for an hour.

The next day, Dad got a babysitter, over our protests, and left us at home when he went in late for work. When he asked me about the log ins and showed me the heart, I played dumb. When he solemnly assured me that no one outside the family could possibly know what his old dog's name had been, I had trouble keeping a straight face. Sis had primed me for that one. I would never have thought of telling him that "Bingo" was a very common word, usually used to mean "I got it!"

He didn't trust me with computers after that. I think he never even considered Sis.

I kept her secret all these years, but when Sis died last year passing a truck in the mountains at 140 miles an hour in the Lambourghini she bought after selling her biotech firm, I thought it would be a fitting memorial.

Of course, the "ps" hack has one lasting memorial already. The people who founded Adobe and invented the printer language called "Post Script" were all from UCH.

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